There's a Man With a Gun Over There (38 page)

DREYHOUSE SHOES
GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE
EVERYTHING MUST GO

“You—you, why yes, I remember you! Of course I remember you!” the bent-over old man says when I walk into the store. The few hairs on the top of his head stand straight up, as if they've been electrified. “You were a boy here once. A boy, yes, who bought shoes from me.”

He tries to make one of his conducting gestures, but his arms won't go that high anymore.

“A boy here, yes. What was your name?”

Still a salesman, I think. Not hard to guess that many of the men coming into his store were boys in Janesville once. Probably every boy in Janesville of a certain age bought shoes from Mr. Dreyhouse.

“Rick,” I say. “I was Rickie, then.”

“Ah, of course. Yes, Mrs. Ryan's boy.”

“You remember after all these years?”

“Please. It wasn't just money for me,” he says. “It was a life I had. Such wonderful people I met.”

“Do you remember, Mr. Dreyhouse, your shoe X-ray machine?”

“The Adrian. Yes, the lovely Adrian.” He pauses and then lifts his shaky fingers and points toward the back of the store. “You come with me.”

We part our way through some soiled beige curtains into a backroom lit by flickering fluorescent lights. Shelves filled with shoe boxes lean this way and that. The air smells of oil and leather and rubber.

“Back here.” He kicks empty shoe boxes out of the way, and we go down some rough stairs to the basement. He reaches up and pulls the beaded chains connected to overhead bulbs as we walk through the musty smell.

“Voilà.” He pulls a dusty canvas off, and there—with pieces of its aluminum trim hanging loose and what looks like the splintered dent of a kick mark in its side—is the old shoe fluoroscope.

“You put your feet in there!” he commands.

Without thinking, I step up and stick my feet in the hole. Waves of memory come back to me. I close my eyes and think, for the briefest second, I might see my mother standing there. When I open them, though, I see Mr. Dreyhouse putting the frayed cord of the machine into an equally frayed extension cord that dangles from the light switch.

“Do you think this is safe?” I ask.

“It is if I don't touch the exposed copper.” He holds up the wire, and I can see the dark glitter of the exposed wires between shreds of old knit fabric.

“I come down here all the time to try on shoes. I love to see my toes wiggling there. It makes me feel young again.” He smiles, sharing a secret with me. “You won't tell my daughter. She's the one who's selling the store. She doesn't understand. She thinks I'll get something from the radiation. What does she know?”

He plugs the cord in.

“Here we go,” he says.

He flips the Bakelite switch. Nothing happens.

“This machine's like me. Sometimes you got to give us a little push to get us going.”

He flips the switch back and forth and bangs the kick mark on the side of the machine with his foot. Suddenly the Adrian thunks. It snaps to attention. The familiar humming starts, but I hear crackles and then I feel the tingle of a little electric shock.

“Whoa . . .”

“Nothing to worry about. Just a tickle of electricity. Look at your feet, Mr. Reilley.”

“Ryan.”

Mr. Dreyhouse isn't listening; he's looking through one of the viewfinders on top of the machine. I look, too, and sure enough, there are the bones of my two feet in that wavery green light that now brightens and now darkens.

“Too tight, Reilley. See how those shoes squeeze your little toe?”

The Adrian begins to lift and drop, as if it's breathing, and the crackle of the electricity becomes louder and the tingle sharper. I step off the machine and see a slight halo of electricity around Mr. Dreyhouse's fingers.

“Science lets us see the truth inside,” he says. He leans on the Adrian. Maybe the electricity locks him there.

I walk away through the must of the basement. I turn around. He's still back there, haloed in the light of the single overhead bulb, his thin hair standing straight up.

“You'll electrocute yourself,” I yell at him.

“I'm used to it. Finding out the truth requires a little pain sometimes, Mr. Reilley.”

67.

S
ergeant Richard Ryan received a United States Army Commendation Medal from the Forty-Second MP Gp (Customs) for his work as a translator and black-market investigator in Germany during the early 1970s.

R. M. Ryan is the author of another novel and two books of poetry.

This novel is dedicated to Steven Unger, who died in November of 2011, late casualty of the war in Vietnam.